Around The World

Posted: July 15, 2012 - 12:45am

Around The World

PARIS

A feud involving the French president’s live-in girlfriend, his former partner and his eldest son may have tarnished the new leader’s carefully cultivated image as “Mr. Normal” — credited with helping him win the spring election among a populace weary of his flashy predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Francois Hollande agreed to take a question about the family feud that has riveted the media during a television interview Saturday — a sign that in the Twitter era, even French leaders can’t keep their private lives private.

But he sure did try.

Midway through the nationally televised interview on tradition-steeped Bastille Day, the reporters asked for his reaction to “tweetgate” as the feud is known. It began with a tweet sent out by his companion, Valerie Trierweiler, during last month’s legislative elections. The tweet expressed support for the political opponent of his ex-partner. Segolene Royal, the mother of the president’s four children, who was defeated in her bid for a parliamentary seat.

Hollande may have agreed to take the question, but he quickly shut it down, saying he intended to keep his public and private lives separate — and that he had asked those close to him to do the same.

But it may be too late to put the genie back in the bottle, since the tweet has set the French political establishment aflame, and turned the president’s image on its head.

LONDON

Just. Stop. Raining.

That was the unusual plea published in an editorial in The Times of London on Saturday, a measure of Britons’ growing frustration with months of miserable weather.

“Let us make our position crystal clear: We are against this weather,” the venerable newspaper wrote in an unsigned opinion piece. “It must stop raining, and soon.”

The U.K. is slogging through some of the wettest conditions in recent history. Nearly every day seems to bring showers, sprinkles, drizzles or downpours. On Saturday alone, England’s Environment Agency registered some 75 flood alerts and warnings across the country, including the West England county of Shropshire, where fire and rescue officials received an anguished phone call from a woman who found herself waist-deep in water overnight.

Area manager Martin Timmis said he was seeing flash floods almost every week as storms dumped more water on the already-saturated ground of a country not unused to wet weather.